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Winter Trees

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

William Carlos Williams

Thank you to all my customers and supporters of Laura’s Loom in 2016. I send you my warmest wishes and look forward to seeing you in 2017!

Trees in winter – I took this photo in mid-November 2016 as the first winter snow blanketed the fells between Hawes and Garsdale in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. The light was fading and my camera battery with it as I snapped these trees, bare of leaves, standing sentry in the gloaming. A little photoshop magic has added the ethereal glow. It’s a wonderful tool to use when you’re playing with design ideas, a great way to transform colours and see things with a fresh eye.

This is Fledi, a much loved 19 year old cat. He lived in Germany. I never met Fledi but I have grown to love him through a textile I wove to memorialise him. Fledi’s owner contacted me late last year to enquire if I might be able to create a textile based on the colours of the handsome cat’s beautiful blue eyes. I replied that I would certainly give it a go and it has led to one of the most satisfyingly creative exchanges of my weaving career. Here is the story of how we wove Fledi’s eyes into a textured throw.

Where to begin? Colour was the key. I took this photograph and a few others and enlarged them on my printer. From my stash I pulled out all the colours which I could see in those remarkable eyes. The more I looked the more I realised there was an infinity of tones and surprising hints. I sent snippets of all these yarns to Germany. They came back in little packets – use, don’t use, use a little, use a lot more – plus extra thoughts on sparkle and depth and possible highlights. A few colours went out, a few more came in. The yarns were a jumbled collection of cottons and linens, chenilles and silks and glittery metallics, plus wools to hold them all together.

I sampled. The first two samples were not to my liking but perhaps my client might like them so off they went to Germany with a request for feedback even if it was all negative. We needed to start somewhere on design ideas. I had my own ideas but I could tell that this client had some of her own too. The response was more than I could have hoped for. The first response matched my own thoughts – the pattern was too small, the fabric was not sufficiently textured and it felt too dense and heavy when extrapolated out to a throw-sized piece. But most rewarding was the receipt of more photos, this time of some of my client’s favourite fabrics – an old Flemish tapestry and a Japanese kimono of Itchiku Kubota. My imagination was triggered.

The old tapestry was worn in places but retained its vivid colour in others. The kimono showed, in the words of my client, “a fascinating synergy between a choppy area with a calm area”. Both were hinting at what she described as “more anarchistic movement” – in other words she wasn’t after a flat fabric with no life in it! I was reminded of an exhibition I had seen in 2015 at the Dovecot Gallery in Edinburgh of Kwang Young Chun‘s Aggregations alongside the work of Bernat Klein. The work of both artists used vivid colours and highly textured surfaces but the entirety of their works were very carefully and thoughtfully pieced together. Could I produce something along the same lines in a handwoven fabric?

I got to work on another set of samples and off they went to Germany. This time I made two very different samples, using the same warp but two quite different approaches, to create one brighter more textured piece and one calmer, softer piece. Still with the beautiful colours of Fledi’s eyes as the central theme. Yes! was the definitive answer in return, a mix of the two would be wonderful. Now I really had set myself a challenge!

To weave my throws requires about 12m of warp set on my loom at approximately 1.2m in width. I create three panels which are then sewn together before the entire piece is washed as a single entity. The overall shrinkage is around 30% – 40% in both length and width so there is a lot of weaving required in order to reach the desired finished length and width. Where there is a pattern involved this has to be repeated in exactly the same way for each of the three panels, so that when the woven fabric comes off the loom and the three pieces are aligned the pattern will match across the seams. It involves a lot of careful measuring as the weaving progresses.

The next challenge was finding sufficient yarn in the required colours. My throws are an eclectic mix of mill ends and repeatable yarns. I am a certified yarn-aholic and love nothing more than diving into my colourful stash to see what else I can use when I run out of that perfect mill end which now, of course, can’t be found for love nor money. Many of my yarns were a bit too fine so I started winding them on bobbins as two or three strands of different colours and different mixes, such as silk and cotton. In doing this I was able to create new subtle colours which allowed me to blend my weft colours. I have always considered weaving to be a form of painting. When you haven’t got exactly the right colour in your stash blending yarns like this can often provide the answer. It became an interesting exercise to see just how many variations of blue I could create from only six or seven options.

I finally finished the weaving and set to on the sewing. It took hours, stitching up the side seams then hemming along the top and bottom. The whole piece was over 2.4m square before it went into the washing machine. It tumbled off my dining room table in great heaps of fabric. But eventually it became one single entity and the whole piece went into the washing machine followed by the tumble dryer. It’s a heart-in-mouth moment and I always start with the gentlest wash and the shortest amount of time in the dryer. If necessary I can wash it all again but if you overdo it the first time you’ve lost the fabric and the hours of work that went into creating it.

The finished piece is a triumph in my eyes – areas of peace, areas of calm, an agitated tension and above all it rejoices in the colours of Fledi’s eyes. I was delighted. My client was over the moon. And now we’re planning another collaboration, I can’t wait!

What is ‘Salted Wool’ you ask. Well, I didn’t just want to put ‘Socks’ on the label, that’s pretty obvious and giving them a name starts an interesting conversation!

I source most of my wool from within 10 miles of my home, but one year we had an idyllic holiday at Kylesmorar on Loch Nevis in the Scottish Highlands, and there we met some Black Welsh Mountain sheep who didn’t know what to do with all that fleece they grow each year. I offered to take it away and do something with it.

Black Welsh Mountain Sheep at Tarbet, Loch Nevis

The only way to reach Kylesmorar is on foot, via an amazing 9 mile hike along Loch Morar, or by ferry from Mallaig. I didn’t relish hauling three bags of fleece along the 9 miles of footpath, beautiful as it is, even in the rain, so we put it on the ferry and along the way we hit a wave which sprayed the wool….and the name ‘Salted Wool’ was coined. You can buy ‘salted lamb’ from sheep which live on salt marshes, so, I thought, why not ‘salted wool’!

The wool itself goes on quite a journey. From quiet loch side it travels to a busy scouring plant in Bradford. Then it passes through spinning machines over 100 years old in Huddersfield and eventually reaches a family hosiery business in Leicestershire that’s been knitting socks for even longer than that. Everything is grown and processed within the British Isles. There are no added dyes or chemicals and no foreign wool – just some Bluefaced Leicester wool from farms in and around Sedbergh in the Yorkshire Dales, plus some Hebridean wool from a pedigree flock in Cumbria. We blend the three wools to arrive at a gorgeous natural shade of grey which we hope you’ll love.

Loch Nevis

Our ‘Salted Wool’ socks are 80% wool with 20% nylon added for durability and strength. They have cushioned soles for comfort and are machine washable on a gentle 30C wool cycle. Please don’t put them near a tumble dryer or they will shrink!

Wool being delivered to the ferry

Our socks are for walking or cycling, canoeing, mountaineering, farming, skiing, or simply for skipping, wearing around the house instead of slippers or for keeping your toes warm in bed…..or all of the above if you can’t bear to take them off!